Still living and partly living with TS Eliot | Brief letters
Poetic licence | Crossed wires | Clueless about Covid | Muting The Archers | Brexit walkaboutSome years ago, when our GP asked how I was, I confounded her by replying, without thinking, “Living and...
View ArticlePlague poems, defiant wit and penis puns: why John Donne is a poet for our times
Master of the Revels at a time of persecution, Donne broke new ground with poems that burst with sexual desire and intellectual curiosityIt was 1593 and John Donne was 21: tall, dark and exquisitely...
View ArticleDon’t forget the centenary of AE Housman’s Last Poems | Letter
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land has been getting a lot of media coverage, but there is another poet whose work is still relevant, writes Max HuntWhile the world marks the centenary of TS Eliot’s The Waste...
View ArticleTS Eliot’s The Waste Land issues weather warning for our times
A century on, modernist poem’s visions of a desiccated landscape still resonate todayWeather plays a key role in TS Eliot’s modernist classic The Waste Land. Its centenary is being celebrated now, even...
View ArticlePoem of the week: from a renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr
Two poets confined by Covid use a traditional Japanese form of chain writing to share their longing for escapeWolves accompanyme, a dream I’d like to have,lope across a steppe,howl an ode to the...
View ArticleTop 10 books about gardening
Going beyond how-to guides, these books encompass fiction, history, poetry and ecology to show how gardens can be places of liberation as well as beautyBooks about gardens and gardening range from...
View ArticleOmar Musa on using humour to talk about racism, colonialism and inequality
Drawing on a printmaking technique he learned from punk-rock climate activists in Borneo, Malaysian Australian author and poet Omar Musa wrestles with race, family and isolation in Killernova, his new...
View ArticlePJ Harvey, poet: ‘Dorset is light and dark, ecstasy and melancholy’
The singer-songwriter has written an extraordinary narrative poem that glories in the landscape and dialect of her home county. She talks about angst and ageing and treats Kate Kellaway to a personal...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Welcome to Donetsk by Anastasia Taylor-Lind
A poet and photojournalist reflects on her experiences working in Ukraine, both in 2014 and nowWelcome to DonetskYou teach me this wartime trick –to look for living pot plantsin the windows on Kievska...
View ArticleCharlotte Brontë’s $1.25m ‘little book’ of 10 poems returns home
Manuscript entitled A Book of Ryhmes (sic) measures 10cm by 6cm and was written by the author when she was 13A tiny book, smaller than a playing card and containing 10 tantalisingly unpublished poems,...
View Article‘I was consumed with anger’: Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron’s brilliant,...
He wrote the music for Scott-Heron’s astonishing streams of social consciousness – and then his royalties got cut off. The jazz-funk artist explains why he focused on a comeback instead of...
View ArticleSuper-Infinite by Katherine Rundell review – a deft portrait of John Donne
Rundell captures John Donne’s unique vision in all its power, eloquence and strangenessIn 1611, John Donne composed a funeral elegy for 14-year-old Elizabeth Drury. It contained one of his most...
View ArticleEvelyn Araluen wins $60,000 Stella prize: ‘I was one paycheck away from...
In the first year poetry was eligible to enter the Australian literary award, the debut poet has won for her collection Dropbear. She’s thrilled – but says prizes ‘cannot be the way we sustain the...
View ArticleA rarely acknowledged leading light of literary criticism | Letter
Cambridge University may not have always welcomed female academics, but Laura Riding’s work inspired an era of new criticism, writes Dr Mark JacobsKathryn Hughes, reviewing Terry Eagleton’s book...
View ArticleValentina Polukhina obituary
My friend and colleague Valentina Polukhina, who has died aged 85, was the leading authority on the life and work of the Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. She wrote more than 20 books of literary...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Solitude is poor … by Olha Kobylianska, translated by Olha...
The Ukrainian poet’s modernist work grips the reader and commands attention with its political parable of power and trust set in the eerie beauty of natureSolitude is poor …Solitude is poor?Continue...
View Article‘The pendulum has swung’: Why we female Trinidadian writers are having our...
Monique Roffey, the Costa-winning author of The Mermaid of Black Conch, on the lit-boom that’s happening on the Caribbean islandLast week, Trinidadian writer Lisa Allen-Agostini’s novel The Bread the...
View ArticleThe best recent poetry – review roundup
Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort; Out for Air by Olly Todd; Hiding to Nothing by Anita Pati; Emblem by Lucy Mercer; The Golden Thread by Amali Gunasekera Music for the Dead and...
View ArticleOn my radar: Lias Saoudi’s cultural highlights
The Fat White Family frontman on sonically tripping to Sarah Davachi, rewatching Threads and a heroic history of poo in artLias Saoudi is the frontman of rock bands Fat White Family and the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Importents by Naomi Foyle
Heavy rain, dead starlings and a pale pink tsunami of ‘penis fish’ foreshadow the election of a dictatorImportentsThe week before the election of the dictator, people hotly debatedwhether Friday the...
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